X-Ray

It’s difficult not to be curious
about this bone-man under the skin:
to think how he’s carried me over the years
without malice or contempt. In return
I’ve fed and clothed him of course,
shared the same bed, been shaped by his will,
but even after a lifetime together
I can’t say I know him, not for real . . .
apart, that is, from a broken wrist
when he once came peeping through.
And now there’s this inner-map of his ills,
that ageing stoop, those honeycombed hips,
the thinning tail-end bits. But what
really appals is his Model-T look.
He’s indistinguishable — except to the nurse —
From the millions like him who’ve come and gone
since one of us first stood up. Perhaps
it’s time to applaud his ancestral support
and keep this negative by the bed. Even then
it’ll be tough to view that crumbling master-plan
without a more personal sense of loss.

By Peter Bland

From Best New Zealand Poems 2003

Happy Birthday Philip

Happy Birthday to Philip Larkin. No doubt he would have hated birthdays, miserable bugger that he was.

The great poems like ‘The Whitsun Weddings’ and ‘Aubade’ no doubt recommend themselves without any mention from me, but here is one of my favourites, a poem not often mentioned but great in its own exquisite way.

First Sight

Lambs that learn to walk in snow
When their bleating clouds the air
Meet a vast unwelcome, know
Nothing but a sunless glare.
Newly stumbling to and fro
All they find, outside the fold,
Is a wretched width of cold.

As they wait beside the ewe,
Her fleeces wetly caked, there lies
Hidden round them, waiting too,
Earth’s immeasureable surprise.
They could not grasp it if they knew,
What so soon will wake and grow
Utterly unlike the snow.

A small triumph over literary theory

In an article that will have teachers everywhere silently nodding their heads in sympathy, The Onion reports of a certain courageous notebook computer at Brandeis University which committed a self-inflicted execution error so that professors, academic advisors, classmates, and even future generations of college students would never have to read Jill Samoskevich’s 227-page master’s thesis.

Professor John Rebson had already read through three drafts of his student’s 38,000-word thesis, entitled ‘A Hermeneutical Exploration Of Onomatopoeia In The Works Of William Carlos Williams As It May Or May Not Relate To Post-Agrarian Appalachia’.

“I guess when she got to the chapter about how the ‘imitative tactility’ used in the first two stanzas of ‘Young Sycamore’ can act as a ‘neo-structuralist, pre-objectivist perlustration and metonymy’ of the importance of anti-Episcopalian sentiment in the rise and fall of central West Virginian coal miners’ unions, the computer just decided that something had to be done for the greater good.”

Thanks to this laptop’s steadfast courage, Jill’s classmates or future students will never have to pick their way through dense and discursive passages about ‘The Red Wheelbarrow‘ and North Carolina farming communities.

“I’ve already forgotten why ‘Queen Anne’s Lace’ symbolizes the advances in modern agricultural implements, but I’ll never forget that brave computer’s last words: ‘You will lose any unsaved information in all applications. Press any key to continue,'” fellow student Mark Weiss said.

“One determined computer has triumphed over years of misapplied literary theory.”

‘Windows is Shutting Down’

A funny and beautifully crafted poem by Clive James, which appeared in a recent ‘Monthly‘.

Windows is Shutting Down

Windows is shutting down, and grammar are
On their last leg. So what am we to do?
A letter of complaint go just so far,
Proving the only one in step are you.

Better, perhaps, to simply let it goes.
A sentence have to be screwed pretty bad
Before they gets to where you doesnt knows
The meaning what it must of meant to had.

The meteor have hit. Extinction spread,
But evolution do not stop for that.
A mutant languages rise from the dead
And all them rules is suddenly old hat.

Too bad for we, us what has had so long
The best seat from the only game in town.
But there it am, and whom can say its wrong?
Those are the break. Windows is shutting down.

Jasper Gamble, the poetry of spam

A few short weeks ago, I began receiving emails from a brilliant poet who goes by many eccentric names, including Jasper Gamble, Summer Pitts, Thomas Colon, Wean Diesel, and even Rosetta Beard.

These pseudonyms were all, I realised, cunningly contrived to mask the poet’s true identity; but I like to call him Jasper, after his first missive to me..

The first email message began:

“Haven’t we met somewhere before? :)))”

With an opening like this, Jasper got my attention, not least because he apparently has three mouths.

Want to increaase your pleasure?
Boosst your sexual performancce?
Learrn how to bring unimaginable plessure to your woman!

I assumed Jasper must have used some eccentric spelling for poetic effect. When he brilliantly places an extra A in “increaase”, I know just how he feels.

And how about the stunning neologism “plessure”? A portmanteau of “pleasure” and “pressure”. Give it to me Jasper!

The best, however, was yet to come. His first poem. I call it “task”:

task
I fear explanations explanatory of things explained.

This film is apparently meaningless, but if it has any meaning it is doubtless objectionable.
face

That last image puts one in mind of Bergman’s “Persona”. Bravo.

Jasper changed his name to Summer Pitts for his next work; formally similar, but undergoing a subtle process of evolution.

see
Concentration is the secret of strength in politics, in war, in trade, in short, in all
the management of human affairs.
info
The essential self is innocent, and when it tastes its own innocence knows that
it lives for ever.
to

How’s that dangling preposition? The sudden shift of tone from formal aphorism to colloquialism, as in “info”? Brilliant.

Someone called Alyson Crews caught my attention, but I knew it was my Jasper playing tricks again.

“Let’s be having you!” he said; and I replied you’ve already got me Jasper!

high
Kindness is the sunshine in which virtue grows.
pak
Take the tone of the company you are in.
forever

Next he called himself Nikki:

they
With thee conversing I forget all time.
friend
Nothing can be made of nothing he who has laid up no material can produce no combination.
and

Then as Dexter:

glad
One ought to hold on to one’s heart for if one lets it go, one soon loses control of the head too.
some
A page of history is worth a pound of logic.

Amen to that brother!

I’m sorry to say Jasper then went on to spoil our burgeoning relationship by presuming to comment on my penis size, which while surely modern and hip and down with the kids and everything, is just a bit too close to the gutter for my sensibilities.

I decided to terminate our association, and instead treasure the memory of those special weeks when Jasper blessed me with his strange and beautiful poetry.

In that spirit I share it with you.

‘Bird Imitations’

My son flatters magpies
arms raised, running
through a cloud of birds

They break and burst
gasping into flight
and end — fixing

with an outraged
scandalized look

unable — or just
unwilling

to see the compliment